eDJ Contributor: Greg Buckles
Posts by Greg Buckles
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- June 17th
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Will the Cloud Compound the Dark Data Syndrome?
My definition of Dark Data differs from Wikipedia:
“Data relevant to a discovery request that is either never disclosed or is produced without contextual information that could affect the interpretation of that data.”
My first interview on cloud sources as discovery targets turned up surprising frustration from the savvy eDiscovery Counsel for a national plaintiffs firm. I expected to hear about immature collection capabilities and defendant’s who struggled to preserve or collect from Office 365, SalesForce or other cloud systems. I did not expect that requesting parties might be completely in the dark about where a production comes from or how it was collected. eDJ’s consultants have had too many recent engagements supporting the evaluation or migration of email and files to the cloud to doubt the trend. Microsoft has been touting the rapid adoption of Office 365 with corporate and public sector verticals. Many corporations seem to have moved critical ESI to the cloud without a clear plan to meet eDiscovery and Information Governance requirements.posted at 10:30am on Jun 17th
- June 4th
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You Can’t Run Away from Dodd-Frank
When a client recently asked my opinion of the impact of the Dodd-Frank Act on corporate IT, I had to do that thing that consultants hate and admit that I had not even considered it. I knew that the ‘Wall Street Reform and Consumer Act’ was passed in reaction to the 2008 economic downturn, but the new requirements that I had researched all applied to my financial clients; banks, hedge funds, broker dealers or others already regulated by the SEC or CFTC. Then Dodd-Frank came up in an analyst briefing with a provider who was eager to burn analyst credits to get our perspective. That was enough for Babs Deacon and I to subject ourselves to large chunks of the 2,300 page law signed July 21, 2010 as well as an incredible array of secondary analysis scattered amongst the 13.3 million Google hits. The lack of blogs, reports or articles that actually applied to non-financial corporate IT gave the initial impression that the majority of public corporations were off the hook. Then I found an SEC statement that described the Act as “a framework that will support an entirely new regulatory regime”.
posted at 9:00am on Jun 4th
- May 16th
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Federated Search – Behind the Covers
Businesses of all sizes are migrating files from unstructured file shares to onsite and cloud based content collaboration systems at a remarkable rate. Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 and 2013 are finally seeing rapid adoption and eDJ working analysts have seen increasing inquiries on managing eDiscovery and compliance risks in these new environments. Almost all of these new ESI repositories come with search indexes to support the end user experience and to satisfy new information governance requirements like the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. We will be publishing a research report on the IT impact of the new ‘corporate transparency’ mandates shortly, but I wanted to explore the risks and benefits of leveraging the ‘in-place’ search indexes.
posted at 11:28am on May 16th
- May 7th
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The First Step – Know Your Data
I cannot remember how many consulting clients have asked me to review their retention policy/schedule without having any hard data on their unstructured digital landfills. Typical corporate records manager, “We’ve been working on this retention schedule for over a year. We have over a hundred categories identified. We just need your help defining our software requirements and defining the user process.” Even well intentioned clients frequently get the cart before the horse. Tell me about your data sources and the content profiles before we try to determine whether an archive, content management or other system is appropriate to enforce retention policies. Last week I participated in a webinar with Jim McGann of Index Engines on Data Profiling to control risk and cost. Index Engines has had onsite and service offerings for relatively low cost inventory/profiling of tape collections, shares, SharePoint and more when compared to typical eDiscovery processing costs. We are hearing the big data players like Symantec, IBM and HP-Autonomy push the business intelligence message, but that CIO-level pitch can fly right over the heads of legal, records management and IT admins who are struggling with the day-to-day data glut. So how can data profiling drain these corporate backwater data swamps?
posted at 9:39am on May 7th
- April 23rd
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Symantec Vision – Buckles Perspectives on Symantec 4.0
It has been over six years since I left Symantec’s product management team, but that has not kept me from the annual Symantec Vision conference. This year’s theme was the massive “Symantec 4.0” reorganization and strategic overhaul initiated this January by the new CEO Steve Bennett. In the keynote, Bennett acknowledged that Symantec has great individual business lines and assets, but has fallen short of customer’s needs for integrated solutions. I won’t even try to cover all of the changes in leadership, business units, products and road maps. Instead, I will stick to my perspective on the potential eDiscovery impact for current or prospective Symantec customers. Keep in mind that Symantec has never been known for fast and nimble development cycles. I believe that Symantec 4.0 needs to deliver an initial round of functional, coherent offerings in the next six to nine months convince a skeptical market that the changes are working.
posted at 3:33pm on Apr 23rd
- April 11th
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Lessons From My First Bootcamp
The eDJ team speaks at a lot of events, webinars, conferences, lunch-n-learns and retreats that all have their pros and cons. Last week I ran our first “bootcamp” on corporate mobile discovery in Los Angeles. The bootcamp concept was to run interactive scenarios on a single topic for 30-60 corporate and law firm participants. I had no idea how much prep work would be involved to create the corporate profiles, players, module challenges, approaches and team decisions for this half day session. Fortunately for me, mobile device discovery is a serious enough concern that we actually had folks fly in to participate. Truth be told, I was too ambitious in trying to cover policy through production of mobile content. In the end, we adapted on the fly to feedback, and kept the emphasis on minimizing unique mobile content, preservation strategies [...]
posted at 8:55am on Apr 11th
- March 5th
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Losing Your iPhone While Under Hold – Sanction Bingo
Counsel have always struggled to balance preservation obligations against unreasonable interference in the custodian’s ability to function in day to day business. To put it simply, the preservation effort and user impact has to be in proportion to potential risk of loss and subsequent legal consequences. In the decade since civil litigators and criminal prosecutors latched onto executive emails as key evidence, enterprise emailand archiving platforms have generally solved the preservation vs. impact challenge for email. The corporate BYOD invasion by personal mobile devices has created an even greater challenge without mature technology solutions. Most corporations still rely on custodians to preserve any potential ESI on their smart phones, tablets or home systems. They don’t have a lot of choices unless the matter justifies the relatively extreme expense and effort of incremental forensic acquisitions of custodian devices. Alternatively you could [...]
posted at 10:37am on Mar 5th
- February 19th
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Managing eDiscovery Momentum – It Takes Time to Turn the Ship
My email signature read, “eDiscovery Smokejumper” for the longest time. From this you could infer that a lot of my customers sought my services in light of a recent or impending eDiscovery disaster. The aftermath of runaway costs, spoliation issues, privileged productions and general discovery malfunction can temp an aggressive consultant to ‘save the day’ by throwing out the existing systems and starting over. The corporate ship of eDiscovery does not turn on a dime. The sheer number of moving pieces, interested parties and potential pitfalls make radical migrations a last resort. I have done them in extreme individual cases where the chosen provider or technology simply could not support the escalating scale or complexity of the matter. The safer strategy is typically to optimize the process and personnel on legacy matters already residing on current systems while starting new [...]
posted at 9:00am on Feb 19th
- February 6th
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LTNY 2013 – The Aftermath According to Buckles
This year’s LegalTech New York was my favorite of the fourteen that I have attended so far. The first reason is that we (the eDJ team) went with a plan that included plenty of time to walk the exhibit halls and dedicated down time to write notes and decompress. I took my own advice for once and kept to the plan instead of trying to accommodate every last minute briefing request. Next was the upbeat mood and sense of excitement. Don’t get me wrong…some providers are definitely struggling to adapt their offerings to this dynamic market. However, the majority of exhibitors and attendees I interviewed spoke of new implementations, increasing caseloads and a recognized need to add eDiscovery capabilities. Last was the wealth of deep, mature conversations both on and off the panels. For once, it was not “eDiscovery 101″ [...]
posted at 10:07am on Feb 6th
- January 23rd
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LTNY 2013 Survival Guide
Are you ready for next week at LegalTech New York? I can’t say that I am ready yet, but I and the eDJ team will be there, ready or not. We expect that this year will see record attendance, at least for the exhibit halls and sponsored sessions. With the eDiscovery market in full recovery from the recession, the number of exhibitors listed on the LTNY site will meet or exceed the 2010 peak numbers, even without the third floor exhibit hall. Requests for panel and briefing slots started coming in last October and we have been fully booked since December. That level of early commitment and planning says that eDiscovery providers are feeling confident and want to make sure that their message gets out. I am just happy to see corporations and firms investing in the tools, process and [...]
posted at 1:40pm on Jan 23rd
